Cellulosic fibrous webs, such as tissue products, are in almost constant use in daily life. Toilet tissue, paper towels, and facial tissue are examples of cellulosic fibrous web materials used throughout home and industry. Although consumers have long accepted a cellulosic fibrous web that remains unaltered from the base sheet, there is a need for such cellulosic fibrous webs to have a consumer acceptable aesthetic appearance. This aesthetic appearance of a cellulosic fibrous web can provide consumers with the impression of a high quality product. It may also be desirable to impact the cellulosic fibrous web with a certain amount of bulkiness. The property of bulk can be desirable for high quality products because it is associated with both softness and absorbency from a consumer viewpoint.
Likewise, embossing paper products to make the product more absorbent, softer, and bulkier, over similar products that are unembossed, is known in the art. Embossing technology includes pin-to-pin embossing where protrusions on the respected embossing rolls are matched such that the tops of the protrusions contact each other through the paper product, thereby compressing the fibrous structure of the product. The technology includes male to female embossing, also known as nested embossing, where protrusions of one or both rolls are aligned with either a non-protrusion area or a female recession in the other roll. Exemplary embossed products and processes for embossing products are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,953,638; 4,320,162; 4,659,608; 4,921,034; 5,246,785; 5,490,902; 6,287,422; 6,299,729; 6,413,614; 6,455,129; 6,458,447; 6,540,879; 6,694,872; and 6,783,823.
In addition, exemplary products and processes that provide for the deep-nested embossing of multi-ply tissue products are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,294,475 and 5,686,168. While these technologies can be useful in order to improve the embossing efficiency and glue bonding of multi-ply tissues, it has been observed that when certain embossing patterns are produced, the resulting tissue paper can be less soft, less absorbent, and exhibit lines of strain when the web material is in a tensioned condition. It has also been found that these lines of strain remain even after tension has been removed from the tissue paper. This can be particularly true for embossed products where the embossing pattern has an aligned orientation. “Aligned” is intended to mean that the centers of any given set of embossment regions of an embossing pattern are collinear with respect to at least two axis of the tissue paper. Thus, as would be expected, products having any of these less than desirable characteristics can have less than desirable softness and absorbency and detract significantly from the appearance of the product. Lines of strain in a tensioned web product can provide difficulties in web handling and produce end products that are irregular and/or have a puckered appearance.
Thus, in order to overcome these problems, it would be advantageous to provide a web product having a pattern embossed thereon that has an offset, or shifted, appearance. In particular, it would be advantageous to produce an embossed paper product that has an offset, or shifted, emboss pattern disposed thereon, that provides a paper product having absorbency, softness, and bulk characteristics at least as good as those of previously embossed products but improved strain characteristics of those same previously embossed products. Such a product could have an improved appearance and provide improved web handling characteristics over such previously embossed products.